Tulalip News

Drew Christie Draws Guns

The animator who’s made films about drones, plagiarism, and talking whales turns his sights on guns. Guns, guns, guns.

By Charles Mudede, The Seattle Stranger

Drew Christie hates guns. He didn’t grow up around them, he doesn’t understand why so many people love them, and he doesn’t want them in his house. Guns just kill people. That’s what they do best. And if you own one, it’s more likely to harm you or someone you love than protect you or someone you love from some burglar. Christie (beer in one hand, sketchbook in another, sun in the sky) was saying these things to me as we sat on the porch of his Central District home. The house is yellow and huge, and it was first owned in the old times by a tobacco merchant. In the 1960s, it became a home for nuns. Now it’s where he sleeps, eats, and does art.

But who exactly is Christie? He is a local filmmaker and animator whose work appears regularly in the New York Times‘ Op-Docs series. A short film of his, Song of the Spindle, screened at Sundance in 2012. Also in 2012, he was a finalist for a Stranger Genius Award in film. Because his films involve a lot of historical, social, and scientific facts, Christie is constantly researching this and that neglected or forgotten part of American culture. His current but not complete animation project about the cultural history of guns—working title: The Haunting of America—was under way even before Newtown returned gun control to the center of mainstream politics.

Three things in his research so far have caught Christie’s imagination: One, the NRA’s idea of Second Amendment rights actually came from the Black Panthers. Two, many of the towns in the Wild, Wild West actually had more gun-control laws than cities do today. And three: There is no more potent symbol of the United States today than Sarah Winchester, the heiress of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, who kept adding rooms to her mansion because she feared its completion would fatally expose her to the ghosts of people killed by the guns her family manufactured.

The Black Panthers Are the Forefathers of the Right-Wing Gun Nuts

This is not an exaggeration. Look at the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” For most of American history, the “well regulated militia” part was not ambiguous or ignored, as it is today. Gun ownership was really about the mobilization of a citizen army. But, as Adam Winkler and other historians have explained, it was the Black Panthers who first really confused this understanding by claiming that the Second Amendment was about private rights rather than the rights of militias. On May 2, 1967, the Black Panthers showed up at the California statehouse with their guns. In 1968, Ronald Reagan, with the support of the NRA, signed the Gun Control Act in response to the Black Panthers’ boldness. (The NRA’s motto at the time was “Firearms Safety Education, Marksmanship Training, Shooting for Recreation.”) It was not until 1977, when the old NRA was replaced by the gun-nutty one we have today, that the Black Panthers’ position on gun ownership was adopted by the NRA, by dropping the “militia” bit. The NRA’s motto became “The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed.”

Dodge City Guns

During our conversation on the porch, Christie explained that whenever you talk to a gun nut, he or she eventually begins to go on about the good old days, the days of the Wild, Wild West, when citizens had lots of gun freedoms. But this is a complete fantasy. It’s not how it was at all. Towns like Dodge City, Kansas, actually had signs that ordered visitors to “leave your guns at the sheriff’s office.” The police and town officials knew that guns in a populated place, a place with lots of bars and gambling, was a recipe for disaster. Christie’s point? The gun laws we have in our cities today are actually more relaxed than the ones they had in 19th-century boomtowns.

Sarah Winchester and the Ghosts

Poor Sarah Winchester. Fearing that her gun-manufacturing family had been cursed after the untimely deaths of her husband and child, she turned to a psychic in Boston for advice (this was in the early 1880s). The psychic confirmed her fears. There was indeed a curse on her family. The ghosts of the people who had been killed by Winchester rifles would kill her if she did not move west and build a house that perpetually confused them. Sarah moved west and began building this house, room after room, to keep the murderous ghosts away from her life. The construction only stopped with her death in 1922. Christie sees this terrible story as a metaphor for American society today. “We profited from all these guns, we made all this money,” he explained as he drank beer, “and now the guns are everywhere. Now we can’t get rid of them. Now they are turning on us. Now they are killing our children, our friends, our families. We all live in Sarah’s haunted house.”

Auction raises $3,500 for Life Skills Program

Isabelle, left, and Mimi Santos check out an art drawing book up for bid at the March 1 “Parker’s Cure” silent auction in support of the Marysville-Pilchuck High School Life Skills Program. Photo: Kirk Boxleitner

By Kirk Boxleitner, Marysville Globe Reporter

MARYSVILLE — Thanks to the roughly 150 or so attendees who filtered through the back room at Alfy’s Pizza on March 1, the Marysville-Pilchuck High School Life Skills Program raised an estimated $3,500 through its annual “Parker’s Cure” silent auction.

“That’s more than double last year’s take of around $1,500,” said Jim Strickland, the teacher of the Life Skills class at M-PHS, who noted that this year marked the first that the silent auction just so happened to coincide with the Life Skills students’ monthly open-mic pizza party at Alfy’s.

This year’s notable auction items included autographs from the Seattle Seahawks’ Russell Wilson, Bravo’s Andy Cohen and Survivor winner “Boston Rob,” as well as two paintings from Seattle-area artists Michael Tolleson and Jack Carl Anderson, a Lynda Allen photo shoot and golf lessons from Alex Stacy at the Battle Creek Golf Course.

Strickland explained that last year’s silent auction funds covered the costs of transporting the entire Life Skills program to the Woodland Park Zoo last spring, including several students in wheelchairs, as well as all of the instructional interns, who are general education students serving as interns in the program as an elective. Auction funds also went toward Fred Meyer gift cards that were used to purchase food and supplies for ongoing cooking activities for the Life Skills students, since shopping and meal preparation are part of the program’s independent living curriculum.

Strickland was gratified to see this year’s silent auction sync up with the monthly open-mic pizza party, because he believes that the socialization afforded by such events is as vital as the funds raised throughout the evening.

“Students who have autism, intellectual disabilities or trouble communicating simply come alive with music,” Strickland said. “It somehow reaches beyond the barriers imposed by their disabilities, and serves as a common language where they can meet the world as equals. We not only use music in the classroom, but many of our Life Skills students also participate in our M-PHS Open-Mic Club, that meets every Thursday after school.”

Strickland credited the Life Skills Program’s parent group with coming up with the open-mic pizza party while brainstorming ideas for fun social opportunities for the students, and expressed his gratitude to Alfy’s Pizza for donating the use of their party rooms for the monthly event.

“Given the power of music and a microphone to bring out a side of our students that nothing else can, we naturally thought of a public open-mic event,” Strickland said. “My hope is that these events can become a time when people, both with and without disabilities, can come together to celebrate the joy and universal language of music.”

The M-PHS Life Skills Program’s open-mic pizza parties run from 4-6 p.m. on the second Friday of the month, and the next such event is scheduled for April 12.

“Come out and join us, to sing or just enjoy some great pizza and a heart-warming show,” Strickland said.

SR 529 bridge nears completion

Kirk Boxleitner, The Marysville Globe

MARYSVILLE — The ongoing replacement of the State Route 529 Ebey Slough Bridge has seen some significant milestones since this winter, and if the weather permits, March 8-11 will mark yet another key step toward the completion of the nearly three-year construction project.

“We’ve completely demolished the existing bridge structure, well below the ground line, to the point that no remnants are visible,” said Joe Rooney, chief inspector for the project with the Washington State Department of Transportation. “Once that was complete, we were able to build the approach fills on the west side of the new bridge, which put us in place to pave the full width, not including the final overlay we’ll be doing in April.”

According to Rooney, so long as the construction work doesn’t get rained out, SR 529 is set to be closed from First Avenue to Milepost 6, including the Ebey Slough Bridge, starting at 8 p.m. on Friday, March 8, and lasting until 5 a.m. on Monday, March 11.

“We’ll finally be pulling out that temporary barrier to put in temporary striping along where the permanent channels will be,” Rooney said. “The plastic imprinted striping will go in place this spring, but the new bridge will be at full capacity for the first time. With a little bit of landscaping work left, we should be completely out of here by May.”

Rooney noted that the original construction timeline afforded WSDOT and its contractor, Granite Construction, well into the summer months to wrap up their work, so they’re ahead of schedule and well within their budget.

“We’ve just been extremely fortunate,” Rooney said. “There haven’t been any significant change orders or design errors or surprising site conditions, and when you’re working that far under the surface, who knows beforehand what you can find. Granite Construction have been great partners as well.”

The project typically employed between 50-60 personnel on site, between subcontractors and specialists in fields such as pile-driving stone columns into the ground to form the supports for the new bridge.

“We built the new bridge well before we demolished the old one, which allowed us to keep traffic flowing throughout construction,” Rooney said. “We also benefitted from replacing a two-lane bridge with a four-lane bridge, so we were able to set up the two lanes on the west side of the new bridge as a staging area for construction without reducing the existing traffic capacity of the bridge. People had two lanes of traffic on the old bridge, and they’ve had two lanes of traffic on the new bridge, so they haven’t seen much difference yet.”

Rooney acknowledged the challenges of demolishing an old bridge directly over a waterway in an ecologically conscious fashion, so as not to contaminate the surrounding wetlands.

“We couldn’t have any debris at all, which is pretty difficult when you’re taking out a 700-foot-long span,” Rooney said. “To their credit, Granite Construction took this task seriously, and still managed to take out the existing structure to 10 feet below the mud line.”

Rooney reiterated that the scheduled closure of the SR 529 Ebey Slough Bridge from 8 p.m. on Friday, March 8, until 5 a.m. on Monday, March 11, is entirely weather-dependent, so check the WSDOT site at www1.co.snohomish.wa.us/Departments/Public_Works/Services/Roads/roadsup for the latest information.

‘By the grace of God’: How workers survive on $7.25 per hour

Meet Crystal Dupont and John White. Both are both struggling to live on minimum wage, one at the start of her career and the other toward the end of his.

By Allison Linn, Staff Writer, NBC News

Working from the bedroom she shares with her mother, Crystal Dupont fields customer service phone calls for a national appliance brand. Dupont, 25, subsists mainly on minimum wage pay. She is living without health insurance because she can’t afford it. Photos: David Friedman, NBC News

Crystal Dupont knows what it’s like to try to live on the federal minimum wage.

Dupont has no health insurance, so she hasn’t seen a doctor in two years. She’s behind on her car payments and has taken out pawn shop and payday loans to cover other monthly expenses. She eats beans and oatmeal when her food budget gets low.

When she got her tax refund recently, she used the money to get ahead on her light bill.

“I try to live within my means, but sometimes you just can’t,” said Dupont, 25. The Houston resident works 30 to 40 hours a week taking customer service calls, earning between $7.25 and $8 an hour. That came to about $15,000 last year.

It’s a wage she’s lived on for a while now, but just barely.

About 3.6 million Americans were earning at or below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour in 2012, and those weren’t all high school students flipping burgers.

About half of them were 25 or older, a little more than one-third were working full time and a little less than three-fourths had graduated from high school, according to the most recent government data.

A person working full time for minimum wage would take home an annual salary of $15,080. That’s a shade higher than the poverty threshold for a household containing two adults, and about $8,000 less than the poverty line for a family of four.

These are the workers who answer your customer service calls, deliver your pizzas, take care of your children, bag your groceries and serve your food.

President Barack Obama has called on Congress to give them a raise by increasing the minimum wage to $9 an hour by 2015.

Liberal-leaning economists say the move would help millions of workers without better prospects pay their bills. It would also pump more money into the economy through higher consumer spending, they argue.

“Unfortunately, for far too many people, the ladder that they’re on doesn’t have a whole lot of rungs,” said Doug Hall, director of the Economic Analysis and Research Network at the progressive Economic Policy Institute.

But conservative thinkers argue the move would hurt both the economy and low-wage workers. They say employers would have to cut benefits or jobs so they could afford to pay the higher wages to remaining employees. Some say the minimum wage already keeps people out of a job.

“There (are) the people who are already working and are getting the minimum wage, and there’s the other group of people who are not working because of the minimum wage,” said Mark Perry, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Caught in the middle of this debate are the workers themselves, millions of whom are preoccupied with the daily worries of getting by.

White rests on the back of an old Dodge pickup truck loaded with firewood at the homestead that has belonged to his family for more than 50 years. White heats his home with firewood, which is plentiful on the 100 acres he shares with his brother, and which costs far less than heating oil. He is also part of a program that helps subsidize energy costs for low-income residents.

Workers like John White, 61.

“It’s by the grace of God that I am having ends meet,” said White, who was out of work for 20 months before he got his current, part-time job delivering pizzas.

White has applied for a number of jobs, but he worries that at his age he is often overlooked for younger, more highly trained workers.

He earns a base salary of $7.25 an hour when he is prepping or doing other chores, but that drops to $4.50 an hour when he goes out on a delivery because he is supposed to also earn tips.

The Department of Labor allows tipped employees to be paid a base salary that is below minimum wage, but the employer must be able to show the employee receives minimum wage when tips are included.

In the past few years, White has relied on help from his church when he couldn’t pay his electric or phone bill, or needed car repairs. His fellow parishioners also helped him pick up odd jobs.

He gets $135 a month in food stamps, now known as SNAP, but lost his state-subsidized health insurance after he got his pizza delivery job. A lifelong bachelor, he lives in a family home in Robesonia, Pa., that he and his sibling inherited.

White’s wages have fallen steadily over the past decade. He worked in a warehouse of a regional department store for nearly 14 years and was earning $12.50 an hour before he was let go in 2003 after a dispute with a co-worker.

He was unemployed for about half a year until he got a job as a security guard in 2004. He earned $10.60 an hour in that job, and held it for six years until he was let go in June of 2010.

He’s been in the part-time pizza delivery job for nearly a year, but his financial situation remains precarious.

He’s hoping to pick up more hours. But unlike steadier jobs he’s had in the past, he’s learned that with this kind of job, there’s no guarantee of stable hours.

“You don’t even get eight hours in one day, (and) you might be lucky to get eight hours in one week,” he said.

Hoping for a better future

Dupont didn’t expect her working life to start out this way. She graduated from high school in 2006, a year after her father passed away, got a job and moved out of the family home.

But Dupont soon found that she couldn’t earn enough money to live on her own. She also needed to be home to help her mother, who is disabled and can’t drive because she has seizures.

Without her father’s income, Dupont and her mother couldn’t keep up on house payments, and the home they’d lived in since 1998 went into foreclosure in 2009. They moved into an apartment and now live on Dupont’s salary and her mother’s disability benefits and food stamps.

In January, Dupont started taking classes at Houston Community College, where she is in the business technology and computer science programs.

She took out a $3,500 student loan but is hoping that she can use scholarships and grants, or perhaps find a second job, to avoid taking on more debt.

On her days off, she’ll sometimes spend six hours studying, working ahead two or three weeks in her classes because she enjoys it so much.

“It tells me that there’s more than what I’m doing now out there – there’s more to life than this,” she said.

Action plan to protect scared sites

By Monica Brown, Tulalip News Writer

President Obama along with four cabinet-level departments joined with the Historic Preservation Advisory Council to develop an action plan that will strengthen the protection on Indian scared sites and enable access by tribes. The action plan created March 5, 2013, is required by the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that had been signed in December 2012, by the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior and the Historic Preservation Advisory Council.

“Through collaboration and consultation, the signatory agencies are working together to raise awareness about Indian sacred sites and the importance of maintaining their integrity,” said Milford Wayne Donaldson, chairman of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. “The tools to be developed under this action plan will help agencies meet their Section 106 responsibilities while affording greater protections for sacred sites. The Advisory Council is very pleased to be part of this historic initiative to address the protection and preservation of Indian sacred sites.”

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. “Since 2009, USDA has stepped up Tribal consultation efforts. We understand the importance of these sites and will continue to make sure Tribes have full access to the resources they need in their communities.”

The MOU will remain in effect for five years and commits the signing parties to work together so that they may coordinate and collaborate ways to improve the protection of tribal sites and ensure tribal access to Indian sacred sites. It is understood that special care and confidentiality of some sites is necessary in some which involve sensitive information. Sacred site locations may be geological features, bodies of water, archaeological sites, burial locations, traditional cultural properties, and stone and earth structures. The sacred sites that have religious and cultural significance may be eligible for the National Register of Historic Places

Energy Secretary Steven Chu stated “Protecting America’s air and water and our nation’s heritage is an important part of the Energy Department’s commitment to Tribal Nations across the country, particularly those that are neighbors to the Department’s National Laboratories, sites and facilities. I look forward to continuing this important work and collaborating with other federal agencies and Tribal Nations to protect Indian sacred sites throughout the United States.”

The Action Plan includes:

A Mission Statement that commits the agencies to work together to improve the protection of and tribal access to Indian sacred sites, in accordance with Executive Order 13007 and the MOU, through enhanced and improved interdepartmental coordination, collaboration and consultation with tribes;
A list of actions the agencies will undertake together;
A commitment to consultation with Indian tribes in developing and implementing the actions outlined in the plan to ensure meaningful strategies for protecting sacred sites;
The establishment of a standing working committee made up of designated senior staff from the participating agencies, as well as other subject matter experts from the participating agencies as needed, to carry out the stipulations of the MOU; and
The commitment of the Agencies to designate senior level officials to serve as members of a Core Working Group, which the Department of the Interior will Chair.

Secretary Salazar also announced that Interior plans to provide a report on the Department’s Tribal Listening Sessions on Sacred Sites. Last year, the Department held several Tribal Listening Sessions across the country to elicit tribal and spiritual leaders concerns regarding sacred sites.

View the action plan here.

Congresswoman Votes Against VAWA Because of LGBT Inclusiveness

Republican Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn said she rejected the VAWA because of its LGBT inclusion.

By Michelle Garcia, Advocate.com

A Republican congresswoman admitted that the only thing preventing her from voting in favor of the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act because of its’ LGBT-inclusive provisions, among others.

Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn told MSNBC that she voted against the newly approved House version of the VAWA due to added protections for LGBT people subjected to partner violence, as well as Native American people and immigrants. Blackburn was one of the 138 to vote against the bill, with 286 in favor. Eighty-seven Republicans supported the LGBT-inclusive VAWA.

“I didn’t like the way it was expanded to include other different groups,” she said. “What you need is something that is focused specifically to help the shelters and to help out law enforcement who is trying to work with the crimes that have been committed against women and helping them to stand up.”

Ore. report says coal-train dust data too sparse

Industry data is too scant to gauge the health effects of coal dust blowing off of trains headed from the Great Plains to export terminals along the West Coast, according to a review by Multnomah County’s health department.

The Associated Press

PORTLAND, Ore. — Industry data is too scant to gauge the health effects of coal dust blowing off of trains headed from the Great Plains to export terminals along the West Coast, according to a review by Multnomah County’s health department.

County Chairman Jeff Cogen, a coal export opponent, requested the report on health effects, The Oregonian newspaper (http://bit.ly/Z6n9yg) reported.

Local governments can’t stop the export projects, he said, but “the burden should be on the coal companies and the train companies to prove that this is not going to damage the health of our residents.”

One in nine Multnomah County residents lives within a third of a mile of potential coal-train routes, the report said.

Three of the five terminals being considered for coal exports could send trains through Portland – one in Coos Bay and two along the Columbia River in Longview, Wash., and at a Port of St. Helens industrial park near Clatskanie.

The analysis looked at the impact if all three projects succeed, bringing up to 90 million tons of coal through the county on 16 to 19 trains each day. But some of the traffic might be on the Washington side of the river, and two of the terminals haven’t applied for permits.

“The bottom line is a lot of the information on coal dust dispersal is proprietary, and it’s not well validated,” said Gary Oxman, who recently retired as county health officer and oversaw the report. “It doesn’t mean there’s a terrible risk from train transport, but it needs to be illuminated more.”

The report says the federal government should do a regional study of export proposals, a call similar to one made by Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber.

The dust contains harmful metals, including cadmium. But little is known about how it’s dispersed or the size of the particles. Smaller particles are more likely to lodge in the lungs.

BNSF Railway has estimated that up to a ton blows off of a single car. But terminal and rail officials say most of the dust is lost near mines in Montana and Wyoming’s Powder River Basin.

Coal shipments have been going through Washington to export ports in British Columbia for decades with no complaints made to regulators there, say advocates such the Alliance for Northwest Jobs and Exports, a trade group that includes railroads and coal companies.

“Coal dust is one issue where people involved in the alliance feel very, very comfortable that it’s not a concern,” said spokeswoman Lauri Hennessey. “I really feel it’s a red herring.”

The report concludes the trains a mile long would generate relatively small increases in diesel pollution and noise, but they would go through areas already heavily affected by pollution. The trains could create cumulative delays of up to two hours per day at at-grade rail crossings, the report said.

—

Information from: The Oregonian, http://www.oregonlive.com

3 rail cars derail in Missoula, spilling coal

Crews work to clean up spilled coal and repair tracks on Tuesday where three Montana Rail Link rail cars derailed. The derailment near Railroad Street West and Trade Street in Missoula. Photo: Tom Bauer/Missoulian

Associated Press

MISSOULA, Mont. — Three cars on a Montana Rail Link train derailed in Missoula with one of the coal cars spilling some of its contents.

MRL spokeswoman Lynda Frost tells the Missoulian ( http://bit.ly/XLR53U) the train cars derailed about midnight Monday. Frost says one car was upright, one was tilted and one tipped on its side.

No one was injured. The cause of the derailment is under investigation.

Frost expected the derailment to be cleaned up by Tuesday evening.

A conservation group that opposes plans to increase the number of coal trains from the Powder River Basin says Tuesday’s spill is a reminder of the risks.

The Northern Plains Resource Council says the export terminals proposed in Oregon and Washington could mean up to 40 trains a day moving through Montana.

Information from: Missoulian, http://www.missoulian.com

Healthy twist makes steamed clams even better

Asian steamed clams with broccoli rabe. Photo: Matthew Mead / Associated Press

By Sara Moulton, Associated Press

I’d love to claim that this wonderful recipe required hours of arduous research and testing (not to mention the expert application of all of my hard-won culinary skills) before I was able to settle on the exact proportions of its ideal ingredients.

But I’d be lying. In truth, I had almost nothing to do with it. The clams did it.

Certain ingredients — including clams, mussels, rack of lamb, skirt steak and dark chocolate — make meals delicious with very little effort on your part.

Really, you’d have to be an idiot to screw them up. Clams and mussels are especially generous, delivering a one-two punch of taste thrills: the succulent bivalves themselves and the deeply flavorful juices that stream out of them when they’re cooked.

My favorite way to mess with clams is to steam them, as in this recipe. You toss all the ingredients into a pot, pile on the clams, put on the lid, crank up the heat, and presto!

Ten minutes later the dish is done. The only problem is that the clam liquor at the bottom of the pot is so tasty that I’m forced to sop it up with slice after slice of bread.

That’s why I decided to bulk up this dish with broccoli rabe, a healthy and savory vegetable that absorbs some of the clam liquor as it cooks (though the clam liquor that remains still cries out for at least a slice or two of toasted country-style bread).

As a way of blunting the vegetable’s slightly bitter edge, your first step with broccoli rabe is to blanch it.

Cut off the tough ends of the stems, then boil it all in a large pot of salted water for two minutes. Next, drain it and transfer it to a bowl of ice water to stop the cooking and set the color.

Finally, chop it crosswise into pieces about 1/2-inch thick. It’s just much easier to eat that way. The garlic, chili sauce, ginger and sesame oil in the broth are complements strong enough to stand up to the robustness of the broccoli rabe.

After insisting above that there’s no way to screw up cooking with clams, I’ve got to emphasize one crucial step, a step to ensure that the little guys turn out tender.

You need to remove each clam from the pot as it opens up. The first ones will be good to go after four or five minutes. The last clam might stay clammed up until five or six minutes later, by which time the first clams — if you’d left them in — would be horribly tough.

That’s it. Quick, easy, nutritious, delicious and satisfying. Try it and see if you don’t end up happier than a clam.

Asian steamed clams or mussels with broccoli rabe

2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 tablespoon grated or finely chopped fresh ginger
½ cup finely chopped scallions (white and green parts)
3 large cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon Chinese chili sauce (or your favorite hot sauce)
½ cup dry white wine
½ cup low-sodium chicken broth
3 dozen littleneck clams or 2 pounds mussels, scrubbed well
½ teaspoon sesame oil
3 cups blanched and coarsely chopped broccoli rabe
8 thick slices country-style bread, toasted

In a large saucepan, heat the oil over medium high. Add the ginger, scallions and garlic and saute for 1 minute. Add the chili sauce, white wine, chicken broth and clams. Cover tightly and cook until the clams start to open. As they open, transfer the clams to a bowl. It will take 7 to 10 minutes for all the clams to open. Discard any clams that do not open.

Keep the saucepan over medium heat. Return the clams and any liquid in the bowl to the pan. Add the broccoli rabe, then cook just until heated through. Add the sesame oil and stir well. Divide the clams and broccoli rabe, along with the cooking liquid, between 4 shallow soup bowls. Serve each bowl with a few slices of toasted bread and a soup spoon.

Makes 4 servings. Per serving: 450 calories; 100 calories from fat (22 percent of total calories); 12 g fat (0.5 g saturated; 0 g trans fats); 45 mg cholesterol; 52 g carbohydrate; 4 g fiber; 8 g sugar; 29 g protein; 500 mg sodium.

Birds’ activity hints at the arrival of spring

A sign that winter is not yet over, Varied Thrushes are still present on PAWS campus. In the spring, these birds head to their breeding territories in the fir forests of the mountains and foothills. Photo: Kevin Mack, PAWS

By Kevin Mack / PAWS

Although winter officially lasts a few more weeks, many wild animals on the PAWS campus are already feeling the approaching spring. Small birds are still foraging together in their winter feeding flocks, but there is palpable tension within the groups. Formerly content to feed side by side with one another, some of the male birds have begun to squabble when they feel a fellow flock member has come too close. They have also begun to tentatively sing their trilling territorial calls.

Click here to see more photos of the birds on the PAWS Campus.

Visit the wildlife section of the PAWS website if you would like to discover more about the organization’s work. Also check out the common problems page as we are about to enter the time of year when wildlife conflicts are most likely to occur.